Nelson Centre of Musical Arts, 48 Nile St, Nelson 7010
Hear from 2026 Ockham New Zealand General Non-Fiction Book Award winner Tina Makereti and 2023 Adam Prize winner Joseph Trinidad as they unveil the lives of their ancestors in order to understand themselves. Chaired by Sylvan Thomson. From the macro to the micro, this session explores how short creative non-fiction can shine the light on who we are and our place in the world; how understanding our own family can lead to self-understanding. In her first book of non-fiction, prizewinning author Tina Makereti writes from inside her many intersecting lives as a wahine Māori – teacher, daughter, traveller, parent – and into a past that is as alive and changeful as the present moment. This Compulsion in Us is a collection of frank and moving essays about the wāhine who have show many ways of being a Māori woman, the pan and dark humour of living with an alcoholic, a blue boob from breast cancer treatment, and the potential of art to return power to survivors of colonialism. In his debut essay collection, Lucky Creatures, award-winning Filipino-Kiwi essayist Joseph Trinidad explores the lessons of his grandmother’s chicken farm and his grandfather’s lucky golden fish; the vibrancy of his home country and its rites of passage such as tuli, beauty pageants and national Boy Scout jamborees; the contradictions of Aotearoa, which welcomes his family’s labour but insists they leave their mother tongues at the border; and his own journey of coming out, along with the hard work of actualisation that follows as he and his partner grapple with the desire to have a baby.
